Fiber Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) is a technology that implements network convergence. The FCoE technology enables a fiber channel (FC) and an Ethernet to share a single and integrated network infrastructure. An existing FCoE network includes a controlling FCoE forwarder (cFCF), an FCoE data-plane forwarder (FDF), and a data center bridging (DCB) network. The cFCF is responsible for collecting virtual link entry information reported by the FDF, performing route calculation in a unified manner, and sending a generated route entry to each FDF; an FDF is responsible for implementing local forwarding of an FCoE packet, establishes virtual links with the cFCF and another FDF by using a virtual adjacent (VA) port, and maintains virtual link entry information locally; and the DCB network refers to an Ethernet that includes devices supporting a data center bridging function and can transparently forward an FCoE packet.
In a route synchronization mechanism of an existing FCoE network, a cFCF needs to collect entries reported by each FDF to build a full-network topology, to calculate all routes and distribute the routes to all FDFs one by one. When the number of FDFs increases, a processing overhead of the cFCF increases; and each time the topology changes because an FDF goes online or offline, the cFCF needs to re-synchronize FC route information in the entire network. When the number of FDFs increases, an overhead used to update FC routes increases, which results in poor network scalability.